May 15, 2012

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a "telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996)."

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was "Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue."...

Yikes. What a title. I remember when titles like that were everywhere.

Completely ineffective, even if it reveals no injun blood. Warren has always considered herself a squaw, based on that marriage application from her great-great-great grandmother from 1890-something, that she stumbled upon in the family scrap-book.

So that's how she's always lived her life, and that's how she's always been perceived by those around her, and she's always had to face the same persecution and bigotry that she would have faced had she actually been Cherokee.

traditionalguy said...The funny thing is that now after 26 years of scoffing up someone else's benefits by a strategic lie on her resume is about to come to an end... she wants everybody to feel sorry for her.

position and intersection. A savings of 5 letters each for a total savings of 10 letters.

see if you can trim any from these babblings from a couple of genius academics who are WAAAAY smarter than us and stuff:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

or

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Homi K. Babba and Judith Butler, respectively. But not respectfully. Why do these idiots have jobs?

Liberals and the media have a love for her as big as the sky. Stop making them so sad!

(It would be interested to see if she taught her son and daughter to manipulate the AA system as well. They are grown ups now in their late 30s. Did they get the place of some other white or minority in a university? Or go right to the front of the hiring and promotion line later on perpetuating the fraud Mommy started?)

Given how the world works these days, I'm surprised that no *actual* woman of color stepped forward to say she applied for the same position at Harvard and was not accepted. Or even another white woman, for that matter, who lost out on that job to Warren.

To my mind, this whole thing has always felt like a networked back room deal from the very beginning, with Warren doing Harvard the favor by identifying herself as a minority to meet their AA goal.

Obviously, you're late to the party and have missed several of Ann's posts noting that Warren was almost certainly one of several well-qualified candidates. All she's questioned is the extent to which fauxcahontas got a leg up on the competition.

So unless you're willing to say that Warren would have blown away the competition, you've got no point.

GetReal, she's not well regarded by me. Her research into a field I practice in was a load of horse manure. Specifically the "study" of bankruptcy and medical costs that she put out in a hack job to influence the health care debate.

I'm surprised none of these stories or comments mention the 1986 movie "Soul Man" where the actor C. Thomas Howell pretends to be black to get a Harvard Law scholarship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Man_(film)

I think Hollywood could do a remake of this using Warren's story. We could get current day Mollie Ringwald to play Warren. Or that actress who played "Stands with a Fist" in the movie Dances with Wolves.

The sad but well-deserved saga of Elizabeth Warren would make a good plot line for a novel, but for the fact that a more interesting version was already written. For her own reasons, Warren wanted to pass as a native-American, the ethnic group that's perennially at the bottom of the American heap in socio-economic (and even basic health) parameters. Her problem was that she has always been a rich, Waspy type having no idea even how to locate the bottom of the heap.

The novel telling that story, but from a much more believable angle, is Roth's The Human Stain. In many ways, Roth's story is the antithesis of Warren's, in large part because it's starts out in pre-affirmative action America where a black man might want to pass as Jewish. But it ends in the same place as Warren's campaign is about to -- crashing and burning after a collision with the weird racial code that has come to dominate these discussions. Lefties will hate her for trying to misappropriate the benefits of a racial victimhood that's clearly not hers. Righties will hate her for being a pandering lefty fraud. All she'll really have left are the yellow-dog Dems, and as Coakley discovered, there aren't enough of them even in deep blue Massachusetts to rescue her.

If it requires a DNA test then it proves the pointlessness of the whole thing. As someone pointed out on another thread, isn't the idea of affirmative action to increase "diversity" and bring in other points of view from different cultures? If it takes a high-tech medical test to reveal she has a minute trace of Cherokee DNA then how is any purpose of affirmative action fulfilled by hiring her?

Richard Dolan: "Her problem was that she has always been a rich, Waspy type having no idea even how to locate the bottom of the heap."

Although I'm opposed to her politically and think she has embarrassed herself with the Indian claims (as well as other stupid things she's done) we should at least be fair to her about the actual facts of her life. Here's what her Wikipedia entry says (lightly condensed by me):

Elizabeth Herring was born...to working class parents Pauline and Donald Jones Herring. She was the Herrings' fourth child, with three older brothers. When Warren was twelve, her father, a janitor, had a heart attack, which led to a pay cut, medical bills, and eventually the loss of their car. Her mother went to work answering phones at Sears and Warren worked as a waitress.

So, whatever her failings, she hasn't always been a rich, waspy type and it does seem she has at least a passing acquaintance with the bottom of the heap. Those are the facts (unless her wiki entry is bogus, too, and is only 1/32nd truth).

I give her credit -- sticktoitiveness -- for staying in the race, but I question the wisdom of it. I'd love to see her internal polling numbers -- does America's Politico have access to them? Perhaps AP can report on them.

It is good to see that everyone can discuss the positionality and intersections of women without making any tasteless, double entendre jokes. Humankind, by fits and starts it is true, is indeed evolving into a higher, more civilzed state. Either that or affirmative action is a bigger joke than sex.

Chomsky had this to say about jargony frauds. It's brutally delicious.

There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.